The Bordentown free school was a pronounced success. In its first year the number of pupils rose from 6 to 600, and the town built a new school-house. The town, however, could not accept a woman as the head of a school of 600 pupils and a man was named principal. She became his assistant. “I could bear the ingratitude, but not the pettiness and jealousy of this principal.”
Whether the pettiness was real or imagined, Barton could not endure a secondary position. While she debated resignation, her nerves gave way, causing a case of laryngitis. Early in 1854, she resigned and left for Washington, D.C., where she hoped to improve her health and “do something decided” with her newly realized “courage and tolerable faculty of winning [her] way with strangers.”
Barton’s health did improve in Washington, and she was soon able to “do something decided.” Charles Mason, the commissioner of patents, hired her as a clerk. At this time no women were permanently employed by the Federal Government though previously there had been. Most officials agreed with Secretary of the Interior Robert McClelland who declared that there was an “obvious impropriety in the mixing of the two sexes within the walls of a public office.” She gained the confidence of Commissioner Mason, however, and became his most competent and trusted clerk. Moreover, she combatted the many dishonest clerks who sold patent privileges illegally. The whole affair, she concluded, made quite a commotion, and the clerks “tried to make it too hard for me. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience; in fact it was very trying, but I thought perhaps there was some question of principle involved and I lived through it.”
[Illustration: _James Buchanan (1791-1869) held several public offices before becoming President in 1857. He was a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. He was secretary of state for James K. Polk and ambassador to Great Britain during the Presidency of Franklin Pierce. As President he felt powerless to deal with the States that seceded in the last months of his administration though he abhorred their actions. He retired to his home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania._]